It's good news Bioware is taking this feedback to heart. Video Games are an EXTREMELY competitive market. Even a franchise like ME cannot rest on it's past success and expect its fanbase and potential supporters alike to stay loyal with a mediocre product. I think much of the backlash they're received is warranted. As well as a lot has been overly harsh, but a variety of issues need to be addressed to determine what is expected from a storied developer/IP. The true value and issues are somewhere in the middle. It's imperative to any franchise that the developers do their best to wade through post-release issues and support their user base if studio survival and brand name alike are to be intact a year or three from now. I think in much a part to developers like CD Projekt Red and Rockstar (to name just a couple) are setting the bar so high. Even fantastic franchises like Bioshock have buckled with great fanfare and history, so this is a pretty big deal to ME/Bioware's continued existence.
I've been looking forward to this one with some trepidation. Technical glitches and some padding are to be expected from a project such as this. However, poor writing, uninteresting characters and too many uninspired missions are not. It sounds too much like it was stuck in the shadow of the original trilogy and the developers at the top and writers thus were relegated to not straying too far from the script or able to make too radical of a change from what came before. Unfortunately it sounds that way, that they gambled on the past instead of a bold, new future mechanically this series deserves, and frankly needs at this point to survive.
Luckily I have a plethora of excellent to decent games to keep me busy until they remedy this game's playability with patches. I hold out hope Prey will be a must play game and at that time of release, I plan to have knocked two or three of the five games I am currently committed to and will re-evaluate then which will be my next purchase. At this point my money is on Prey and sadly I may not get to ME anytime soon unless they can drastically improve it.
Oh great another Microsoft console to collect dust. Where are the exclusives? Since the One launched I have maybe half a dozen under my belt and now nothing really on the horizon. Microsoft seems to be chasing Sony in everything except quality, exclusive games. I wish them success in making this console something special but until the games catch up with Sony I doubt I will be spending money on it just to play a handful. Unless it so overpowers the PS4 it would become my go-to system for multiplatform releases because of a drastic improvement in things like textures, framerates, draw distances etc. Even then I might remain leery considering the investment as I'm going to guess this system will be just shy of $800, once it gets up to there it makes sense to look at new PC rig build for me.
It really is a double sided sword that Nintendo has fantastic properties but becomes a niche system ultimately. Going all the way back to the 64, there are a couple of handfuls (or less recently) of quality titles mostly exclusive that span over several years and then rinse and repeat with each new system. At the very least since the gamecube, systems have been backwards compatible with each new system to greater or lesser degree and their hardware is both well made/designed and homebrew friendly in many ways. The wii u has been pretty slow for awhile now so this really shouldn't shock anyone.
What would shock me is the Switch getting some serious third party development support and get more multiple platform releases in addition to their core properties so owners can have the best of both worlds.
Love me some Clueless Gamer, but as for impressions of FFXV or any other game Conan skewers, before you play you would be better left to making an informed impression by other gamers and/or reviewers. I'll just float this out there: http://www.polygon.com/2016/10/19/13326636/final-fantasy-15-pre-review-first-hours-preview-video-square-enix-ps4-playstation-4-xbox-one
Not sure if I will preorder this, I am a fan of most things FF, though SE has dropped the ball many, many times on this series sadly.
Argh that stupid map returns. I never beat SMT: IV. I remember really trying but I put the game down after about thirty hours into it for some reason. Then when I picked it back up like a month later I spent hours trying to figure out where I was supposed to go and what to do. It was to the point after hours of wandering around I had to either start over somewhere or give up and haven't played it since.
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